The Slippery Slope of U.S. Intervention

During his recent hour-long interview with the New York Times‘s Thomas Friedman, President Barack Obama mentioned something in passing when he described the need to be better prepared for post-conflict rebuilding and reconstruction before authorizing an intervention: “Our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do.” Note the phrase I’ve italicized above — it’s an unnoticed but entirely remarkable acknowledgment from the commander-in-chief, because it is directly at odds with what he told the American people prior to, and just after, the start of the Libya intervention in 2011.